G,
the twelfth letter of the Ogham alphabet, in Irish called
gort `ivy,'
Auraic. 1138
,
1187
=
4229
,
4285
. In early ortho-
graphy the letter g represents either the voiced stop or the
voiced spirant : in absolute initial position g is a voiced
5guttural stop ; medially and finally when preceded by a
vowel, and initially when subject to lenition, it is a spirant ;
when preceded by a consonant it may be either. The medial
stop, normally written c, is sometimes written gg. In some
early instances the medial stop is written g even between
10vowels, Thurneysen,
Grammar § 29
-
§ 32
.
In later orthography the stop is written g in all positions,
and the spirant gh. By the fourteenth century the voiced
dental spirant (dh) had become a guttural (O'Rahilly,
Irish
Dialects 53
), so that gh and dh are constantly confused in the
15manuscripts.